The political ideas of the eighteenth century are thus in some sort a comment upon the system established by the Revolution; and that is, in its turn, the product of the struggle between Parliament and Crown in the preceding age.  But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.  From no accusation were its statesmen more anxious to be free than from that of a belief in democratic government.  Whether Whigs or Tories were in power, it was always the great families who ruled.  For them the Church, at least in its higher branches, existed; and the difference between nobleman and commoner at Oxford is as striking as it is hideous to this generation.  For them also literature and the theatre made their display; and if Dr. Johnson could heap an immortal contumely upon the name of patron, we all know of the reverence he felt in the presence of the king.  Divine Right and non-resistance were dead, but they had not died without a struggle.  Freedom of the press and legal equality may have been obtained; but it was not until the passage of Fox’s Libel Act that the first became secure, and Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have recently illumined for us the inward meaning of the second.  The populace might, on occasion, be strong enough to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king, or to shout for Wilkes and liberty against the unconstitutional usurpation of the monarch-ridden House of Commons.  Such outbursts are yet the exception to the prevailing temper.  The deliberations of Parliament were still, at least technically, a secret; and membership therein, save for one or two anomalies like Westminster and Bristol, was still the private possession of a privileged class.  The Revolution, in fact, meant less an abstract and general freedom, than a special release from the arbitrary will of a stupid monarch who aroused against himself every deep-seated prejudice of his generation.  The England which sent James II upon his travels may be, as Hume pointed out, reduced to a pathetic fragment even of its electorate.  The masses were unknown and undiscovered, or, where they emerged, it was either to protest against some wise reform like Walpole’s Excise Scheme, or to become, as in Goldsmith and Cowper and Crabbe, the object of half-pitying poetic sentiment.  How deep-rooted was the notion of aristocratic control was to be shown when France turned into substantial fact Rousseau’s demand for freedom.  The protest of Burke against its supposed anarchy swept England like a flame; and only a courageous handful could be found to protest against Pitt’s prostitution of her freedom.